The oral histories of nine local Latina community activists are featured in an exhibit at Cal State Fullerton, allowing listeners to share in the experiences of women who fought for such things as labor unions, health access, immigrant rights and law enforcement accountability.

“Nevertheless” by muralist Kristy Sandoval carries emblems representing the work and advocacy of the nine Latina activists in the exhibit. (Photo by Wendy Fawthrop, The Orange County Register/SCNG)An exhibit at Cal State Fullerton’s Pollak Library features the oral histories of nine Latina activists. (Photo by Wendy Fawthrop, The Orange County Register/SCNG)

“Voces de Liberación: Latinas and Politics in Southern California” runs through June 21 in the Salz-Pollak Atrium Gallery at Pollak Library. Visitors can hear the women’s oral histories on iPods or their own mobile devices using the SoundCloud app.

One of those voices belongs to Theresa Smith of Placentia, who founded the Law Enforcement Accountability Network after her son, Caesar Cruz, was fatally shot by Anaheim police officers while sitting in his SUV in a Wal-Mart parking lot in 2009. Smith began peacefully protesting outside police headquarters two days later; her activism helped lead to the proposal and passage of the Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015.

“The work of a community activist is not easy. It’s not easy at all,” Smith says in her oral history. “An activist doesn’t get paid for this. … I do this, like I said, for my son. I do it for his sons, for my grandsons, for the future of all of our sons and daughters and because, in activism, there is no gender, race, religion. We’re all one human race.”

That many of the women are “everyday people” appealed to history master’s student Jael Müller, who curated the exhibit from CSUF’s Lawrence de Graaf Center for Oral and Public History’s Women, Politics and Activism Project, led by Natalie Fousekis, professor of history and center director.

Jael Müller, Cal State Fullerton master’s student who curated the “Voces de Liberación” exhibit at Cal State Fullerton. (Photo courtesy of Cal State Fullerton)

“These stories are out there for the public, not just stored in an archive,” Muller said at a preview of the exhibit last month at which eight of the nine women appeared.

Speaking out, and inspiring others to do the same, was what brought many of the women to the place they are today.

Labor union leader Ada Briceño, founder of Orange County Communities Organized for Responsible Development, was 18 when she started as a front-desk clerk at an Anaheim hotel, then worked her way up to be the first Latina president of the local hotel workers union at 26. In 2014, the union pushed through an ordinance in Los Angeles requiring at least a $15.37 hourly wage at the city’s large hotels and won union recognition for more than 900 food service workers at Angel Stadium.

One turning point Briceño, born in Nicaragua, talks about in her oral history is going to the USC hunger strike in the late 1990s, when service workers fasted to win a guarantee their jobs would not be contracted out.

Ada Briceño, labor union leader (Courtesy of Cal State Fullerton)

“I thought to myself: Wait a minute, Why are workers in Orange County making so much less money? Why are they mistreated?” Briceño says in her clip. “I got the idea that we needed a movement of workers. That it wasn’t the five or six union leaders that were going to be the heroes for a whole working class in Orange County but that we really had to build leaders from the ground up in order to effect change in the county, to bring more justice to the workers.

“When we teach them how to stand up on the job, to their boss who’s being unfair to them, we also at the same time teach them how to stand up to a spouse at home, to stand up to their landlord if they’re being unjust, to stand up to their teacher in the right conditions if they’re being discriminated upon. … Once you teach somebody how to fight in one area they’ll fight in all.”

America Bracho said she was always an activist.

“I don’t have a memory of a day when I wasn’t,” said Bracho, a physician, as she attended the preview. At 5, she sold raffle tickets to pay for polio vaccinations. She was inspired by her mother, who was a professor in Venezuela and would pick up students and drive them to their classes.

America Bracho (Photo by Wendy Fawthrop, The Orange County Register/SCNG)

Bracho is founder and executive director of Latino Health Access, a center for health promotion and disease prevention in Santa Ana, and has consulted for government and private agencies around the country on such issues as Latino health, health education, minority women, cultural competency, community organizing, diabetes education and HIV.

She is a believer in taking advantage of people’s multiple talents and finding a mechanism for people to connect.

“What do you like? Dance? Then dance with kids in the neighborhood,” she said. “You have to start by being part of the solution.”

She said she is a fan of women – as the ones who reach out to neighbors, create ties, tell stories, transfer culture and preserve communities. Women who pitch in to help rediscover their power, she said.

“I collect women,” she said.

As she says in her oral history: “I’m so much committed to women’s rights that I think it has to be included in everything you do, that you don’t need programs for that. That if you work on diabetes, you need to fight for women’s rights. If you work on HIV, you need to fight for women’s rights. If you work in housing, you need to fight for women’s rights. That women’s rights, in everything, is like oxygen.”

Other women featured in the exhibit are Rose Espinoza of Rosie’s Garage; Antonia Hernández, executive director of the California Community Foundation; Nury Martinez, a Los Angeles city councilwoman; Helen Torres, director of Hispanas Organized for Political Equality; Santa Ana Mayor Pro Tem Michele Martinez, a CSUF graduate; and Angelica Salas, executive director of Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

Students read excerpts from the oral histories of nine Latina activists at Cal State Fullerton on April 26. (Courtesy of Cal State Fullerton)

Reporting on the interesting research and stimulating events at Cal State Fullerton is right up Wendy’s journalistic alley. A San Francisco native, Wendy earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Stanford and a master’s in journalism from UC Berkeley. After working in the news offices at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC San Francisco Medical Center, she became a business/technology reporter for the Puget Sound Business Journal and served as business editor at the Daily Breeze before moving to copy editing and working for the Seattle Times. She joined the Register in 2003, where she was a team leader on the copy desk until early 2017. She teaches copy editing at Chapman University part-time, has two grown children and lives in downtown Anaheim, where she can walk to yoga and good coffee.

Join the Conversation

We invite you to use our commenting platform to engage in insightful conversations about issues in our community. Although we do not pre-screen comments, we reserve the right at all times to remove any information or materials that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable to us, and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy the law, regulation, or government request. We might permanently block any user who abuses these conditions.

If you see comments that you find offensive, please use the “Flag as Inappropriate” feature by hovering over the right side of the post, and pulling down on the arrow that appears. Or, contact our editors by emailing moderator@scng.com.